Become an expert in a field, or may be not!

I was playing around with this Lecture Browser of MIT, where I came to an interesting talk by Sylvia Nasar, the author of "A Beautiful Mind" which is the story of John Nash. Somewhere in the talk, she says something interesting about how and why Nash never tried to be an expert in any field:

... what he did was to simplify a complex problem that appeared to defy solution by pursuing a strategy that the experts in the field [had set up for] and he never tried to be an expert in any field because he felt that absorbing the work of other people would dull his creativity.

A friend of his once tried to describe Nash's style of thinking to me by saying: Everyone else would climb a pick by looking up for a path somewhere up the mountain, not Nash. Nash would go over a completely different mountain he would climb a completely different mountain and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back on the first one...